Monday, March 5, 2012

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

SmartSync Releases New Version Of The App That Turns You Into A God Top
screen_shotSmartSync, which has been doing good business on iPhone app store [itunes link], has released an updated version which a big improvement on the original app, which has become popular because it makes you sound like some sort of omnipresent god. No, I got that wrong. Let's try that again. It's like having a CRM for your friends. When someone calls you, SmartSync displays their latest Facebook statuses or photos against the call. Say they said they were tired. When they call you you say "Wow, sorry to hear you feeling tired!" even before they've said hello. See, suddenly you're all-knowing.
 
Just In Time For SXSW, Getaround Car Rental Marketplace Launches In Austin Top
getaroundGetaround, a car rental community that only launched in May 2011 and subsequently won TC Disrupt NY, is ready to get you where you need to be in time for SXSW. The app that lets you rent a car by the hour, day or week, and comes fully loaded with insurance, 24-hour roadside assistance, and a Getaround car-kit has broken ground in some new territories, including (yep, you guessed it) Austin, TX.
 
DARPA's Cheetah Robot Will Stab You With Its Pointy Legs Top
Seriously: this is what is going to do our fighting soon. Imagine stand-off situations with this bastard rolling through the door and then skittering across the marble floor of Oslo City Hall straight into a crowd of hostages, aiming right at the gunman. The design is based on Big Dog, our former favorite dangerous monster robot, but this guy can to 18 miles an hour, five miles faster than the fastest cheetah - albeit in controlled conditions.
 
Nokia: Our Windows Phones Need To Get Even Cheaper Top
610-2There's little question that Nokia is taking the low-end of the smartphone market very seriously these days. They just kicked off their race to the bottom with the colorful, budget-conscious Lumia 610 at this year's Mobile World Congress, and while it's far and away the least powerful of the Finnish company's Windows Phone brood, it's certainly priced to move at €189. According to Nokia EVP Niklas Savander though, that price tag isn't quite cheap enough. In a brief interview with Pocket-lint, Savander revealed that in order to better compete with Android, Nokia is very concerned with getting their hardware to even lower price points.
 
TVGuide.com Acquires Fav.Tv To Expand Mobile App Team Top
tvguide logoTVGuide.com has acquired social TV startup Fav.Tv in what executive vice president and general manager Christy Tanner says is a straightforward talent acquisition. Plenty of startups are trying to reinvent the tv guide — including Fav.Tv, which was described, when it launched last fall, as not "your grandmother's TV Guide." But TVGuide.com (which operates the TV Guide digital properties while licensing the name to the print magazine publisher) has been trying to evolve too. It unveiled a new feature in August called Watchlist, which incorporates social elements, as well as on-demand/digital listings.
 
Y Combinator-Backed Chute Launches A Twilio For Photos Top
logo-largeWe've heard a lot about photo-sharing apps over the last year or two, and although the launch of a new social photo app may result in eye-rolling by some, images are becoming an ever-more important medium for communication. As our lives, products, and communications becomes increasingly visual, content producers, app developers, and site owners alike all have to ramp up their services to meet that escalating demand. Of course, that's easier said than done. That's why Chute, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, doesn't just want to be another photo sharing or syncing app, it wants to the service every app developer and content producer uses to manage and enhance their photo capabilities. Chute is an Images-as-a-Service startup or, in other words, a cool API for photos. What does that mean?
 
Spotflux Encrypts All The Web Things Anywhere Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-05 at 2.53.09 PMI'm on a privacy tear today so I thought I'd mention this start-up. Officially launching on Wednesday, Spotflux is a browser encryption plug-in for Windows and OS X. Simply put, it protects your Internet connection by encrypting all connections through a VPN. Arguably there are approximately a billion VPN services, but this one looks to be one of the simplest I've seen in a while.
 
Facebook Messenger For Windows Desktop Chat Client Launches After Leaking Top
Facebook Messenger For WindowsYou might spend more time using Facebook if you didn't have to leave a browser window open, so today Facebook officially launches its Messenger for Windows free downloadable desktop client. But since an early tester leaked the download link in December and Facebook responded by making it publicly available, you might already have it. The client lets you persistently chat, receive notifications, and read your news feed from your desktop. Facebook says "For those of you on Macs, we're busy working on Messenger for Mac right now. Stay tuned." Facebook Messenger for Windows can be downloaded here for Windows 7, and it will be promoted to Windows users around the world over the next few weeks. Facebook has exhausted much of the supply of new users to sign up in many countries. The product demonstrates its shift to focusing on squeezing every last drop of engagement from existing users.
 
Keen On… Jeffrey Harris: How To Be a Transformative Entrepreneur [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-04 at 9.22.27 PMAs a forty-year veteran of the venture capitalist industry and the Managing Director of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, Jeffrey Harris has unusual insight into what makes CEOs like FedEx's Fred Smith and Starbucks' Howard Schultz winners. And to pass his insights into this successful entrepreneurial mentality, Harris has just authored a book, Transformative Entrepreneurs: How Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Other Innovators Succeeded.
 
Cleantech-Focused Incubator Greenstart Now Offering Startups An Extra $100K Top
greenstart-logoRemember Greenstart, the San Francisco-based startup accelerator trying to make cleantech sexy? Well, today, it's taking a big leap in that direction. The organization announced it's bumping up the amount of funding its companies will receive. In addition to the $15,000 in seed funding the incubator provides, startups now also have the opportunity to receive a $100,000 convertible note.
 
Apple Makes 500k Jobs? Cloud Services Could Help Make 14 Million, With Half In China And India Top
Screen shot 2012-03-05 at 18.21.12Much was made of the news last week from Apple that its businesses had effectively created over 500,000 jobs in the U.S. not just directly at its company but at the many that link into the ecosystem it has created. Today, Microsoft teamed up with IDC to publish some research that took that one step (or actually 13.5 million steps) further: The two say that cloud computing services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide by 2015, and that in 2012 that number is already at 6.7 million. That development, IDC says, could account for $1.1 trillion annually in new business revenues. That will come in the form of more efficiency for people whose jobs would have originally had more tie-in with IT -- now outsourced in the form of cloud-services -- but also completely new opportunities: half of the jobs that will be created, says IDC, will be in China and India.
 
Just In Time For SXSW, Social Discovery Service Sonar Arrives On Android Top
droid-peopleSocial discovery service (and TechCrunch Disrupt alumni) Sonar has some big news today, and just in time for SXSW: it's arriving on Android. According to founder Brett Martin, support for the Android platform has long been users' most frequent request for the service. But that's not the only thing that's new. Along with the Android launch, the company is also making a slight, but important shift, in terms of how it will show its users recommended people nearby.
 
HTML5 Game Performance: iOS Performs 3x Faster Than Android; iPad 2 Top Device Top
ios-vs-android1Android may be the most popular mobile browser, having today overtaken Opera, but when it comes to HTML5 performance, it looks like iOS is king. This at least according to a new report from spaceport.io, which claims to be the "first-ever report on the technology's performance on top smartphone and tablet platforms". And it's about time. With Facebook and major carriers and OEMs backing it, HTML5 has been gaining ground as a viable technology to support rich mobile apps on many of today's most popular platforms. Interestingly, many had surmised that HTML5 might throw a wrench in Apple's quest to become the dominant mobile platform, but spaceport's "PerfMarks report" showed that iOS devices and browsers (iPhone, iPad, and Safari) outperformed its Android competitors across the board when it came to rendering movement on-screen.
 
Nokia's 41MP 808 PureView Phone Not Launching In North America Top
808 pureviewSad news, social shutterbugs. Nokia doesn't plan on bringing the megaspectacular 808 PureView to North American markets. The 41MP camera-that-happens-to-also-have-phone-functions will not make the trip 'cross the Pond. Nokia apparently plans on releasing it in countries where Symbian phones actually have a following and it has a chance of making a splash. It's hard to argue with Nokia's decision. With a massive body and a dying OS, the 808 PureView is a niche handset. There is no way it will be a blockbuster hit, worthy of a global marketing and distribution plan. But Nokia reportedly spent five years developing the technology and it deserves to make some people happy.
 
The Privacy Problem: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us Top
2012-03-05 08.42.07This morning I was ready to bust some heads. I got a text message at about 8:39 from Highlight, the hot new social network thing that will disappear once everyone digests the last of their brisket on the plane ride home from SXSW. The SMS was pretty innocuous ("Download the app!") but it included a list of 141 phone numbers. Had iOS been able to handle sending messages to 141 people at the same time, I could have made a lot of fun new friends this morning by texting a bunch of ridiculous stuff to strangers. More important I was about to rail against Highlight exposing my phone number so egregiously, throwing a few "How dare you"s and "This is mindrape"s into the old cesspool that is modern tech blogging. But then I did some digging.
 
The Everything Project: Building A Google For The Mobile Web App Ecosystem Top
everything-tornadoOne of the biggest challenges we're facing as we move into the post-PC era is the challenge of navigating through a disconnected web of applications. Bought and sold as self-contained packages of code, apps are independent little creations, boxes you tap for specific functions. Single purpose beings. Unlike the web, apps are not connected to each other through links (although they could be), nor are they yet accessible through next-generation discovery tools like Apple's Siri. And today's companies are so focused on helping push more and more apps on users through app discovery services, they're forgetting to solve the very real problem of providing a window into the existing ones. How do you Google a database of apps? How do you know which app to launch for the job at hand? The solution to this problem could look something like this: The Everything Project, an engine that searches not for apps, but in mobile web versions of them.
 
With $10 Million In Funding, All-In-One Security App AirCover Launches On Android, iOS Top
1Mobile security services -- tracking your device, or using your device to track others, or making sure you know who is tracking you -- is a hot topic these days. But apparently, when it comes to actual usage of these apps, it's not as extensive as you would think. Figures from Canalys estimate that only four percent of devices have some form of security installed and used. That has led one entrepreneur to come up with a solution: put several of these services into a single app and try to make that into not a "nice to have," not a "should have," but a "must have" for mobile consumers. This was the impetus behind AirCover, a new app out from Founders Den founder Jason Johnson's software company, BlueSprig.
 
Rentcycle Becomes Getable; Launches In-Store Management Platform For Rental Shops Top
getableConsumer_RGB_HorizAttempting to bring a brick-and-mortar industry online is no easy feat. It takes time, investment, and a willingness to roll with the punches. San Francisco-based startup Rentcycle graduated from Founder Institute in 2009 with a mission to bring the "rentals industry" online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers and cloud-based business management and product listing solutions for local rental shops. After graduating from Founder Institute, the startup went through several beta launches, before raising a $1.4 million seed round from Collaborative Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Founder Collective, and Amicus Capital, as well as angel investors including Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Chairman at Yelp, and Founder of Shopzilla Farhad Mohit.
 
Sorry Folks: Samsung Says No Galaxy S III Release In April Top
samsung-galaxy-s-IIIAnd the saga of the Samsung Galaxy S III continues. Late last week a pair of dueling reports surfaced with one stating that Samsung would announce (and ship shortly thereafter) their much-anticipated Android handset in April and another shooting the claim down. Normally, this isn't a big deal — who doesn't enjoy a little back-and-forth every once in a while? — but Samsung Korea has taken to Twitter to officially put the kibosh on an April unveiling.
 
TCTV Interview: Mike Doughty, Author, Singer, Songwriter On The Future Of The Music Business Top
Yes_and_Also_Yes_-_2011_screenI had the distinct pleasure of bringing Mike Doughty, songwriter and author, into the TCTV studio to talk about his new book, The Book Of Drugs, his new album, Yes & Also Yes, and how the music business has changed during his long and tumultuous career.
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)